Thursday, January 12, 2012

Hitler was right about America

Hitler was contemptuous of American society, seeing us - quite rightly, as it turned out - as a mongrel race. Americans were descended from peoples from all over the globe, and America did a workable job of assimilating them into a whole, back in the days when the Intellectual Elite wasn't oddly embarrassed to utter the words "melting pot".

That mixing was most obvious to Europeans of the 1930s and 1940s in the music of the day - Jazz and Big Band. Hitler dismissed it as judenmusik und schwartzmusik - Jewish and Black music (no, he didn't like Benny Goodman or Louis Armstrong). When Duke Ellington went on a European tour, they needed to get from Belgium to Denmark, and the train went through Germany. The train had mechanical problems, and the band spent a nervous six hours with the train surrounded by Hitler's soldiers before finally moving on to Scandinavia. Hitler simply refused to allow these American Schwartze Mongrels to set foot on deutsche boden - German soil.

In a sense, though, Hitler was right to be suspicious of this modern art form as infectious of native European tropes. More and more in the post war years jazz and blues sound began to seep into native European style. Edith Piaf was a fairly pure example of French entertainment that would have been familiar to Der Fuhrer, although I never knew that she recorded this in both French and English, around 1950.

But times were changing. The American cultural advance was relentless, and only fifteen years after the suicides of Hitler and Eva Braun in the Fuhrerbunker, John Coltrain recorded this in Berlin itself:

This song, of course, became Yves Montagne's signature tune. He was perhaps the first to fuse the old French Piaf style with the new American blues/jazz sound. This was from probably the late 1960s, at the height of his interpretative powers:

Duke Ellington, of course, had the greatest version of this song, perhaps his revenge on Hitler:

This is actually my favorite version, because of the soft touch approach. The voice and violin parts are allowed to stand out in front of the orchestra, to sink or swim on their solo talents. Ozzie Bailey offers a simply spectacular performance in both French and English, and Ray Nance on violin gives what is perhaps the ultimate jazz violin solo of all time. Quite a performance when you consider that Nance was known for his trumpet work. Of course, Georgia's own Johnny Mercer translated the lyrics into English.